


libertine

by dinosaurchestra



Series: ison [2]
Category: The Stanley Parable
Genre: Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, [banging pots & pans together] WELCOME TO HELL WELCOME TO HELL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 17:50:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18643066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaurchestra/pseuds/dinosaurchestra
Summary: There’s tapping at the Narrator’s shoulder.It’s late in the morning, ensnared by blackness.





	libertine

**Author's Note:**

> if youve eaten recently dont read this fic

Stanley was there, and then he is here.

The bright light is stark, antiseptically so, and when he gets his bearings he is situated in what looks to be a more than vast white room; a transparent chandelier hanging centre appears to be purely for show, as such a small group of bulbs could not provide sufficient lighting for a function like this.

He considers.

Reality does not exist here.

He peers deeper. At the far end of the room, there is a phone and a bed, suggesting at least intimate suggestion with this liminal space. Stanley’s never been here before. He interrogates his own memory, and finds shattered IV drips, artificial sarcophagi, a camera. _Fucking hell._ This is the room they kept him in during his recovery from surgery. It’s been eight years since, but he can still recognize the faint scent of euthanasia.

Stanley drags his palms down his face. Why couldn’t the Narrator just have flipped the furniture upside down and called it a day or something? Why’d he have to invariably screw up any sense of normalcy Stanley grabbed at (held above his head, like a starved animal clawing at a carrot for entertainment)? Something nagged at him, told him the Narrator’s insistency to keep Stanley verifiably on edge but never, never death ran deeper to skin. He squints. There is an indistinct darkening, grey in the distance near the bed.

He shoulders a sigh, and strolls over to investigate.

As he gets closer, the features sharpen — an individual, with the same sterile white shirt as he but a long, black pencil skirt where he wears pants. Silken (almost perpetually in the state of being pressed) blonde hair frames a face with high cheekbones and a model’s implacable, dissociative beauty.

They were a female impersonator, and her body was sculpted by someone who liked the concept of a woman but had rather likened her neck under his hands than rather his mouth. Someone who liked the aesthetic of humanity rather than interaction with it; through lab’s glass, a story’s pages. Stanley cringes, thinking about the hands inside his brain that the Narrator possesses. Hands, that even after he escapes this multipurposed hell, will roam all over his psyche for years to come — decades, centuries, who knew how long this separation of mortality would curse him?

He concentrates.

Her legs are too long — unnaturally so. She is pale, her flesh polished glass, her figure akin to the Venus De Milo. Her arms curve as he realizes her limbs are ball - jointed, a mannequin’s quirk.

This is supposed to be his lovely wife.

She leans forward and he stiffly embraces her — they fit together like puzzle pieces, and her touch is cold. He touches her and her body does not move, does not pretend to stutter with the movement of breathing. This article of a girl lacks citations. Her eyes are clear, unfogged by thought, and as she gazes at him there is not a scant error in her coding that would diagnose living.

She is pretty in the way that a corpse is pretty. She is a mirror reflection of what his spouse is (was, the dead body that flashes behind his eyelids choruses) she has the severing features, the supple locks, the sex appeal _in rigor mortis._  As she speaks, his entire body locks up in silent horror.

“Love,” she cries, “I’ve missed you—!”

He remembers the artefact the Narrator took this dialogue from.

A videotape of their reunion at the airport after Stanley went home to exchange respects for a dead family member, and his successive return. A year before their wedding, and the conception of a child he would never see. Her dress was patterned with flowers, and she didn’t take it off when they’d made love later that night, panting and high off missing each other for months.

That bitch has covered _all_ the bases.

It is absolutely **_visceral_ **how well he’s captured her image — a teaspoon of melancholy, a handful of nostalgia, a needle of hair. Stanley wants to strangle her. He disturbs himself; he is unnerved, and in this instance knows exactly how the Narrator wants him to feel. Like a child, is that creature; unempathetic and disturbingly so that he sees no end to staining all of Stanley’s decaying recollection with the Narrator’s own interpretation, scraping away all of the employee’s humanities so the only thing that remains is Stanley himself, bare to the bones.

_(something told him that was intentional)_

The Narrator is so utterly uncaring, unconsciously uncaring of how much he hurts Stanley — only that he makes the mark. Possessive. But, still, his paradox of psyche only serves to convolute Stanley further and further. An enigma inside an enigma. A puzzle inside a puzzle. There are hints of deeper depth.

Stanley wants to go home. Stanley fears of the concept.

When he thinks about going home, he thinks of broom closets and buttons and — and that voice, and that man. He’d made himself cosy inside Stanley’s fucking skull, below the hair that the Narrator had oh so lovingly described to him how he’d run his hands (if he has hands, how many? If he has eyes, how many? He eludes subjective thought in every facet, every furrowed brow, and in that abstract yellow line the Narrator luxuries himself in how elusive, how dreadfully fascinating he is to Stanley, he’s got the thirty four year old wrapped around the proverbially nauseating finger) through _before_ —

He shakes his head.

She is looking at him. Like vomit, he forces an answer.

“Wife,” he says, stunted, “you look ill.”

Her gaze lingers. “I feel so much better, now that _you’re_ here, Stanley.” She sets her hands upon his shoulders and they feel heavy and fragile all at the same time. Like a glass cabinet, filled to the stomach with trauma.

He wonders what smashing her face in would be like — wonders what all the little shards upon his knuckles would look like, shiny and red.

She sighs and it’s an entity all on its own, a teething creature that murmurs _Daddy_ and whispers and cracks its tiny little ribs with each newborn breath, akin to the baby they ripped out of her doppelgänger’s stomach. He feels sick. She tilts her head to the side, and Stanley, noisome, presses his lips to just under the left side of her jaw. They’ve gone _in_. Every little physical quirk he loves is there — smoothed over, ruined.

She is a shell of an imitation of herself.

Stanley kisses her.

The chandelier falls and he wakes up with a start.

-

There’s tapping at the Narrator’s shoulder.

It’s late in the morning, ensnared by blackness.

The Narrator doesn’t turn — doesn’t open his eyes. Dozy, “—mh?” and Stanley doesn’t answer. He turns around, lids still shut, but he knows his protagonist has been awake for the violent hours. “Did you have a nightmare, Stanley—?”

“I dreamt,” whispers the other, “about the Parable.”

The Narrator’s eyes (all of them) snap open. He doesn’t answer, this time — tired, his hand ghosts over Stanley’s. It returns. Stanley, still, doesn’t move, eyes unseeing. “Talk to me,” he murmurs, and Stanley instead consciously pulls the blankets over, separating them.

“Could we have met another way?”

This silences him.

“The Parable’s my greatest creation, Stanley, you’re my Prometheus—”

Stanley shifts closer, listening to the Narrator’s quiet voice. (His breathing comes out stuttered, spasming. It sounds like he’s been crying.)

“I don’t imagine we could have met another way. I wish, Stanley, we could have. But it turned out, this way—” and he extends a hand to play with a curl of Stanley’s hair, blending in with the dark around them as it falls back from his finger, “and I’ll always, always love you, in this universe, and every.” His eyes fall shut again, humming now as he laces their fingers together. “You, Stanley, are Schrödinger's Cat — you are my biggest subversion. Something like that.”

(Stanley’s struggling to remain composed.) He doesn’t pull away from the Narrator’s touch. “It’s always — always you. And comparing me to paradoxes, to literary metaphors, to weird and obscure allegories.” He laughs. (Comes out choked,) and his hold tightens on the Narrator. “Wish you’d call me hot for once.”

“You’re hot, Stanley.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t have the same effect.”

The entity, drowsily beaming, brings Stanley’s (quivering) hand up to his lips to kiss him. Why’s the boy trembling—? “You’re the apple of my eye. You’re absolutely ravishing, what with your insistence to drink all my coffee and steal my nightgown in the morning and give me harsh but honest feedback on how I write spiritual sequels."

He opens one eye. Stanley’s head is resting on his shoulder, and his eyes are glimmering bright. “I just thought Coda was a little too dramatic.”

“Yeah?” bringing Stanley’s chin up to level with his with his ring finger under it,

“Yeah,” shakily kissing the other with closed eyes and a half - smile, the two (the Narrator assumes) melting into sleep as easily as he’d been dragged out of it.

**Author's Note:**

> peep that reference to the beginners guide babey !


End file.
